In 1977, Gabriela Ybarra's grandfather, a wealthy Spanish industrialist and former mayor of Bilbao, was kidnapped by members of the Basque separatist group ETA. Over a summer of dread, his children fielded ransom letters and fended off a frenzied press until police found his body. In 2016, Ybarra's mother was diagnosed with cancer, beginning a new cycle of death in the family and pushing her reopen the story of her grandfather's murder. In this slim book, Ybarra blends memory and documentary, reporting and fiction to tell the story of the violence that has haunted her family. Pushing autofiction into new territory, she spins their tragedy into an almost mystical meditation on violence and redemption.
Writer Scholastique Mukasonga lost 27 members of her family to anti-Tutsi violence during the Rwandan genocide. One of those souls was her mother, Stefania, whose ingenuity, humor, love, and absolute devotion to her family shine through this slim memoir. In mournful, playful chapters centered on daily life in their village—bread, their house, weddings—Mukasonga weaves a funeral shroud for her mother. This lyrical memorial won the Seligmann Prize in France and was recently longlisted for the National Book Award in the United States.
A classic of Pablo Almodovar's films, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios is a treat to revisit. Completely over the top, slightly disorienting, but entirely entertaining, this is a gem from the 80s that follows Pepa as she navigates the end of her relationship with a married man. Filled with unlikely coincidences and excellent shoulder pads, this is an excellent mid-week watch.
Waltz with Bashir is one of Dominique's favorite movies because it is so multi-faceted, it is a film rich for analysis. Waltz With Bashir is an animated documentary; the animation resembles a graphic novel. The documentary follows the director, Ari Folman, as he journeys to discover what really happened in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Folman was a part of the Israeli army in the Lebanese Civil War. There are, of course, limitations with the way this film understands the Isreali-Palestinian-Lebanese conflicts, but it's a fascinating piece of culture nevertheless.
The all-female Yemenite-Israeli group A-WA blasted onto the world stage in 2016 with their single "Habib Galbi"—"Love of My Heart"—which layered the haunting vocal harmonies of a traditional Yemeni love song over synthesized riffs and hip-hop beats. This hypnotic banger and its accompanying surrealist video immediately went viral across the Arab world, and it became the first-ever song in Arabic to top the Israeli pop charts. Now, the three sisters behind A-WA have released their second full studio album, Bayti fi Rasi. Just like "Habib Galbi," it's a mix between traditional music and cutting-edge pop, big and playful and always danceable.
Chilean writer Zambra toys with the boundary between fiction and non-fiction in this nostalgic, porous narrative. His way with ~metafiction~ creates narrative folds throughout the novel, so that we are reading a book inside of a book and are constantly swept by the author's invitation to interrogate, perhaps wrestle with, personal memory, the writing process, and the idea of “literature.”
Set in the immediate aftermath of an appalling, notorious sexual assault on a New Delhi bus, Delhi Crime follows the efforts of police officers working under enormous public pressure and with few resources other than their own ingenuity to find and arrest the suspects. At once a visceral police procedural, a tense character-driven drama, and a sweeping, nuanced portrait of India’s bustling capital, Delhi Crime is never burdened by the tropes of any of these genres: it tells its own story on its own terms, horrifying and captivating in equal measure.
Set in the Northern Irish city of Derry (or Londonderry, depending on your persuasion), this boisterous comedy follows the misadventures of a raucous, profane, self-involved set of four schoolgirls and one schoolboy. As the Troubles rage inconveniently around them, Erin, Orla, Clare, Michelle, and James try their worst to get out of exams, weather detention, and earn money for the school trip to Paris. Like the best Irish and British comedies, each episode sees the characters make more and more inane and selfish choices until they reach an uproarious climax—at one point, they try to fake an IRA kidnapping to avoid being banned from the chip shop. Come for the sendups of religious tensions, stay for Siobhan McSweeney as the deliciously sardonic nun who runs the school.
EPILEPSY AND SEIZURE WARNING: Thelma, directed by Joachim Trier, is one part coming of age story, one part murder mystery, and one part supernatural thriller, blended together in a hypnotic, visually stunning movie. Raised by conservative and emotionally abusive Christian parents, the titular Thelma is a quiet, lonely university student. But when she realizes she's attracted to one of her female friends, Anja, she begins to experience supernatural episodes that may be God punishing her, or may be her own power manifesting for the first time. Thelma unfolds in its quiet moments, in its lingering shots of hallways, buildings, and forests, clearly manned by an even-handed and in-control Trier. Yet even in all the silence, Thelma's magic wraps around the viewer as much as it does the bewildered characters.
Why would anyone ever need a cheesy soap? That's what I used to say until I encountered the recent trend in (Spain) Spanish historical fiction soaps, from which Velvet stands out as the origin series. In Velvet, we're transported to a department store in Madrid in the 1940s, where the main character, Ana, works as a seamstress. She and the store's owner are in love, and have been since they were children, but pesky societal and class boundaries won't let them be together. This is exactly what one needs to watch when the world is a little too much, and you need to believe love will prevail above all else.
"An Icelandic saga of the highest order" is how an IMDB review of this movie begins. Set in rural Iceland, this movie, directed by Grímur Hákonarson, follows two brothers who both own ancestral, prize-winning sheep farms. One day, the village discovers that the local sheep have been infected with scrapie, a fatal, degenerative, and highly contagious nerve condition, and they're faced with the prospect of sacrificing their herds to prevent a wider outbreak. It's a touching, slightly unnerving saga.
What would you do if you found out that you share dreams with someone you just met? This question underlines the plot of Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi’s On Body and Soul—a quirky and ethereal romance, though not one for the faint of heart. (Let’s just say it’s set in a slaughterhouse.)
This movie is quite a treat - though it took Dominique a few tries before she finally sat down to watch it, Okja, directed by Bong Joon-Ho, is a Netflix Original movie in which a young girl and her best friend and super pig, Okja, get caught in a battle between environmentalists and a multi-national corporation. Delightfully dystopic, this is a movie well timed for our current environmental crisis.
This gorgeous German period piece revels in the joys and turmoil of Berlin's "Golden Twenties"—the brief, raucous years between the horrors of the Great War and the Great Depression. Police commissioner Gereon Rath, a veteran with a morphine problem, is sent from sleepy Kōln to Berlin to find his father's blackmailers. The investigation leads him through slums, nightclubs, train yards, Communist hideouts, and fine restaurants on the trail of an ever-expanding conspiracy.
A single Icelandic mother and her son embark on an adventure, albeit, not a particularly fun one. Struggling with poverty, the mother and son duo are forced to vacate their apartment, return their recently adopted cat to the shelter, and depend on food samples at the supermarket to complete meals. But along the way, they meet a Guinea-Bissauan refugee applying for asylum in the country, with whom a gentle and kind friendship emerges. It's a sweet, thoughtful movie for when you want to escape your own walls.
What happens when someone is falsely accused of a crime? What happens when that crime is pedophilia? The Hunt is set in a small Danish town, where Lucas, a daycare teacher, has to face unwelcome and potentially life-threatening allegations, while at the same time learning to navigate the toxicity of a small town armed against him. A less contemporary film than the previous two, but a great watch nonetheless!
Patrice Bart-Williams was born in Germany to a Sierra Leonean-Germany family. His most recent album, Life's Blood, demonstrates Patrice's cross-cultural upbringing—reggae rhythms carry his politically-laced lyrics in English. This is a lively and up-beat song with powerful lyrics.
In The Eternal Feminine (Los adioses, dir. Natalia Beristáin), Mexican director Natalia Beristáin portrays the life of Rosario Castellanos, the renowned Mexican poet and diplomat. Interlacing Castellanos's youth and her days as a student in Mexico and Guatemala with the tensions in her marriage later in life, Beristáin presents a complex portrait of a profoundly feminist figure, whose writing and thinking was years beyond her time. This is a sweet and short historical fiction, perfect for a rainy day.
Rosalía is a phenomenon across Spanish-speaking countries, and she's quickly becoming a sensation in the rest of the world. Her music is a refreshing, modern twist on flamenco rhythms, and her voice is stunning, hypnotizing. Some call her the Rihanna of Flamenco... Pff. She may be better.
In the dystopian India of the miniseries Ghoul, Muslims and other groups live under the heel of a hyperviolent state. Young security officer Nidu is posted to an underground interrogation facility, shut in with a small band of torturers and ragged prisoners. Then a strange, ancient force arrives among them, stirring the jailers' dark terrors, hunting them through the concrete maze. Not for the faint of heart, Ghoul crafts a riveting series from the all-too-real horrors of state violence, terrorism, and atrocity.
Born and raised in Cholula, Puebla, a small town a couple of hours outside of Mexico City that sits in the shadow of a powerful (but dormant) volcano, Josean Log is a singer-songwriter with the sweetest, most charming ukulele and percussion based music. He infuses Latin rhythms with shimmering, thoughtful lyrics. Alguien Como Tú is remarkably original—Josean sings that if he can't be the person he loves, then he needs to find someone like them... exactly like them. His whole discography is a pleasure to listen to, so go forth and explore!
Dark is a Netflix original thriller focuses on a small German town shaken by the disappearance of two boys. But when a body finally turns up in the woods, it is the perfectly preserved body of another boy who went missing in the eighties, who's case was never solved. Almost frustratingly slowly, the show unravels the interconnected trauma of three generations of three families forced to reconcile with the hurt they've dealt each other and themselves. This is Stranger Things' sinister German cousin, and if you're anything like us here on the Xeno team, you'll find yourself on the other side of it in three days, reeling and demanding more. The good news is, the second season *just* came out. But a warning—it may be a good idea to grab a notepad and a pen to keep track of who is who and what is what in this fantastic, twisty show.
This week, Dominique binge-watched a Brazilian TV Show available on Netflix called 3%. 3% is mildly like The Hunger Games, in that the show’s conceit consists of a test that allows citizens to become part of the 3% (or the elites). But what makes this show so fascinating is that it is much more complex than “good” and “bad” or “elites” and “the 97%.” The budding resistance movement fighting for more equality is not clearly all good, and the founding principles of the 3% are not all evil. It’s a deeply intriguing show.
Dominique is on a mission to read more contemporary writers in Spanish, and she couldn’t have started in a better place than Guadalupe Nettel. Born in Mexico and living between her native country and France, Guadalupe Nettel has written three award-winning novels and three short story collections. Despues del invierno, published in English by Coffeehouse Press in 2014, follows two parallel stories, one of a young Cuban man in New York and a young Mexican woman in Paris, until they entwine. Nettel’s prose is crisp and thoughtful, yet sweet and honest. It’s a mellow read, perfect for the colder temperatures in the Northern hemisphere.
Tired of hearing the same Top 40 songs at every party? Want to try something new for this weekend’s get-together? Here are some recommendations from the Xeno team based on their anniversary party playlist!
Call My Agent, or Dix Pour Cent in the French, is a TV show comedy about a talent agency in Paris. It's a joy to watch the main characters (all high-powered, fast-speaking Parisian agents) juggle the egos of a similarly eclectic cast of actors and actresses.
We're always looking for great documentaries that transport us to different places and times. Virunga takes you to Easten Congo, where you meet a family of orphaned gorillas and their caretakers, who are battling dangerous political conditions to keep the gorillas alive. It's a poignant, gripping, and heart-wrenching journey.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf was marketed as the African Game of Thrones, which I ultimately found to be a disservice to the book. Instead of high-fantasy, the reader is plunged into a hallucinogenic, violent fever dream chock full of African mythology, terrifying monsters, blood, guts, cunning, and adventure. The story, told by the titular Red Wolf, is piecemeal, episodic, and strange, and at every turn we wonder what story we are meant to be reading until it comes together in sobering and heartbreaking conclusion. It is the first book in planned a Rashomon-style series, the Dark Star Trilogy, and I can only say to Marlon James what Red Wolf says to his inquisitor at the end of the book: "Tell me."
"Esteman" is a Colombian singer and songwriter from Bogota. Known for his catchy rhythms, playful lyrics, and vast musical influences, his performance at Estereo Picnic this year was well attended. "Solo" is a danceable blend of carribbean beats about the joys of being alone! (Fun fact: "este man" is typically used in Colombian slang to say "this man" - Dominique spent a couple of days hearing Esteman's name unable to understand that this was, in fact, his name and not a monicker by series of forgetful friends)
In 2010 the Iranian government briefly imprisoned director Jafar Panahi, and officially banned him from making films for 20 years. Taxi is Panahi's third film since the ban went into effect. A faux-documentary shot entirely on dashboard cameras and mobile phones, the movie follows Panahi as he drives his taxi around Tehran during a single afternoon. Old women, a young accident victim, a banned film distributor, Panahi's young niece, and old friends all pass through his cab as the city bustles around them. Almost entirely plotless, the film lives on the dialogue with the passengers, which can be funny, heartfelt, irritating, or mournful, but always orbits the political. Panahi crafts a tender portrait and stiletto critique of his home city, all the more amazing because it seems to happen by chance.